Bukele, re-elected president in El Salvador with 82% of the votes

The self-proclaimed “coolest dictator in the world” president, Nayib Bukele, completed his re-election this Friday in the presidential elections in El Salvador with 82.66% of the votes, according to the official count. The FMLN candidate, heir to the Marxist guerrilla, Manuel Flores, came in second place with 6.25% of the votes and Joel Sánchez, from the right-wing Arena party, obtained 5.44%, according to the final count.

Thus, Bukele has had the support of some 2.7 million votes in a country with more than 6 million inhabitants, thanks to the fact that he has managed to capitalize on his popularity based mainly on his tough policy against gangs, which also It adds followers in much of Latin America.

Unlike 2019, when he allied with the extreme right to defeat the traditional parties in the first round, Bukele arrived at the February 4 elections with the upper hand.

To achieve the Presidency in 2019, Bukele saw his aspiration of doing so with his Nuevas Ideas (NI) party and later with his allies of Democratic Change (CD) frustrated, so he used the Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA) as an electoral vehicle. ), from the extreme right, despite the fact that he had promised not to seek alliances with this sector.

In 2021, with his New Ideas (NI) party formally registered and with alarms raised by what various sectors called an authoritarian drift on his part, his popularity allowed NI to win the supermajority in Congress, which settled his path. to re-election.

On its first day of work on May 1, 2021, the NI-dominated legislature dismissed the judges of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court and appointed in their place former government advisers and former lawyers of senior officials, all without following the established legal process.

Along the way, the attorney general of the time was removed and Rodolfo Delgado was appointed, who had been an advisor to a state bank and, according to various investigations by local media, who would have buried the investigations for alleged acts of corruption in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic.

The new constitutional magistrates issued an order in September 2021 to change an interpretation of the prohibition on re-election.

The judges “loyal” to the Executive, appointed by the United States, said that the Constitution prohibited re-election for a third term and not for a second consecutive one. This is how Bukele saw the doors open to continue in the Executive power, at least until 2029.

“No, there is no re-election (in El Salvador) and I would be out of the Presidency at 42 years old,” Bukele said in March 2021 in an interview he gave to two Mexican YouTubers.

Bukele’s mandate, before the midterm elections, was characterized by confrontation with the opposition-majority Congress and the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court.

His style of government was marked by what happened on February 9, 2020, when he entered the headquarters of Congress with his security battalion, riot police, and soldiers armed with assault rifles to pressure for a loan.

After praying at the parliamentary leader’s site, Bukele came out to meet his followers and said: “If we wanted to press the button, we just press the button” and asked for patience from his followers, who shouted “insurrection, insurrection, insurrection!”

With Congress under its influence, the confrontation continued with the opposition parties and their mayors, from whom the funds that the Government was required to provide by law were withdrawn. The international community and the press joined in.

Bukele’s popularity became incombustible with the launch of his “war against gangs”, the continuity of which is the cornerstone of his re-election.

At the end of March 2022, an escalation of homicides attributed to gangs claimed the lives of more than 80 people in three days, which is why Bukele asked Congress for an emergency regime.

With constitutional guarantees suspended, such as the right to defense, the Police and the Army proceeded to carry out massive arrests without arrest warrants in popular areas of the country.

This “war” has left more than 76,000 arrests and more than 6,000 complaints of violations of human rights and warnings from organizations, such as Amnesty International, that an unparalleled human rights crisis is brewing since the end of the civil war. In 1992, they were able to gain popular support for their protector and architect: Nayib Bukele.

The president, born in San Salvador on July 24, 1981, added more than 2.7 million votes, with more than a million increases compared to 2019, and has said that, after removing the cancer from the gangs, his country is followed by a period of prosperity.

To trace the last antecedent of this in El Salvador, it is necessary to go back to the 1930s, when the dictator and military man Maximiliano Hernández Martínez did it and established the so-called “Martinato”, which lasted until 1944.